DIY: Lightbox

After I built (and by built I mean put together…) my DIY nail polish rack I was in a craft/DIY mood. For awhile now I’d been wanting a lightbox. There is nothing quite as annoying as having on a gorgeous nail polish and there be no sun outside! I was just sick of having to swatch around the sun’s schedule. So I did a bit of research on YouTube and blogs and figured out a pretty simple (and inexpensive) way to make a lighbox.

I’ve had this light box for about a week and it has made my life SO much easier! For all the info on how make one of these check below the jump 🙂

What you will need:

1. A box. I used a 12 inch by 12 inch square box. I bought it at Wal-Mart for well under a dollar.

2. A box cutter.

3. 1 sheet of white tissue paper cut into 2 pieces

4. Scissors

5. A black piece of poster board (I used a left over piece of black foam board from my nail polish rack)

6. 2 pieces of white printer paper.

7. Tape or glue

Step 1: Cut the flaps off of the box and cut 3 large square holes in 3 sides of the box. Put the side that does not have a hole on the bottom.

Step 2: Glue or tape tissue paper over the holes on the side of the box, and the black poster board over the hole on the top of the box.

Step 3: Glue or tape one piece of white printer paper inside the box like the picture below.

Step 4: Glue or tape one piece of white printer paper to the bottom of the box.

And that’s it! The lightbox itself is completed. It took me all of 30 minutes to build this lightbox.

As far as lighting goes….I picked up 2 75 watt clamp lights at Lowe’s. Realistically you could get away with just one clamp light, but having 2 makes things a bit easier.

The most important part is the light bulb. Light bulbs are far more complicated than I realized! I got the whitest, brightest light bulbs I could get. That turned out to be 75 watt equivalent 5000k Natural Day Light Utilitech bulbs. So far I quite like these light bulbs. They do not distort the polish colors at all, nor is the light so bright it creates a glare.

Overall, this turned out to be a good project for me. I feel like the quality of my swatches has improved, plus I can swatch no matter what the weather is doing outside! Granted it’s not the most fancy lightbox on the planet, but it works.

This is going to be the last DIY project for me for a while, I’m DIY’ed out!

I’m so glad i found this! I’ve been wanting to start a blog for a while and have been trying to research the best way to take quality pictures. This has really helped. Now i just need the courage to actually do it lol.